The Wadi Salib Events of 1959 in Historical Perspective: The Failure of Israeli Absorption Policy?

The year 2025 marks sixty-six years since the outbreak of unrest in Wadi Salib, a neighborhood in Haifa. On 9 July 1959, clashes erupted between residents and Israeli police following the shooting of a local man. Protesters – mostly Jews of North African descent – voiced accusations of systemic discrimination by the Ashkenazi-dominated state establishment. Demonstrators threw stones and damaged offices of the ruling party and the Histadrut trade union. Historians have since interpreted these events as an early and significant political protest against the marginalisation of Mizrahim in Israeli society. The author draws on a range of sources, most notably the Etzioni Commission Report, to pursue two aims. First, it reconstructs the events themselves, placing them within the broader political and social context of Israel in the summer of 1959. Second, it foregrounds the protest’s socio-economic dimensions, arguing that the Israeli government largely ignored the severe financial hardship faced by many Mizrahi immigrants. The Wadi Salib events, in this reading, expose the structural inequalities embedded in Israel’s absorption policy during its formative years and invite a re-evaluation of the intersection between ethnicity, class, and state power.